Category: Politics

I could not have timed my chat with Marvin Kalb better. On Sunday, before talking about cyber hate for the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s 20th Anniversary Tour in Chicago, Kalb and I discussed his most recent book, The Road to War: Presidential Commitments Honored and Betrayed (Brookings Institution Press 2013). The timing was auspicious not just because the book had come out days before but because at least 40% of the nation was reeling from learning about the most recent abuse of Executive power: the NSA’s PRISM program and leaked FISA court Verizon order.

Before I recount some of the highlights of our conversation, I wanted to begin with a wonderful and incredibly apt description of Kalb written by a UPI reporter:

[Kalb] is the senior statesman of U.S. media. Tall, handsome, brilliant, unfailingly courteous, Marvin Kalb looks and acts more like a senior statesman than the chief diplomatic correspondent he was for CBS News and NBC over 30 years when these networks cared about world news. Now these media organizations still bill themselves as world news networks but, most nights, forget about the rest of the world.

Following his prize-studded reportorial career, Kalb became the first director of journalism’s school of higher learning at Harvard — the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Now, still the profession’s senior statesman, he runs the center’s Washington office and hosts “The Kalb Report.” The author of two best-selling novels and a book titled, “One Scandalous Story: Clinton, Lewinsky and 13 days That Transformed American Journalism,” Kalb’s 13th book — his best — excoriates Congress for relinquishing its constitutional obligation to declare war.

The U.S. News and World Report’s Jamie Stiehm describes Kalb’s new book as “an elegant synthesis of how easy, too easy, it has become for an American president, any American president, to go to war” with Congress “ceding its rightful role in declaring war and tends to go along with the man in the White House.” Kalb’s book argues that so much power should not be concentrated in the President.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:

DC: Why has it been so easy for the Executive Branch to ignore the core constitutional guarantee that Congress declare war?

MK: We have a system of law undergirding Presidential authority to go to war — Congressional declaration of War and the power of the purse — yet it has been consistently ceded to the President. When I covered Vietnam in 1968, we had 500,000 troops on the ground. Who gave the President the authority to do so? I am a great believer of law, but if it is ignored with impunity, to whom do we turn?

DC: How did we get to that state of affairs–the President doing what he wants without check? Are things much different in light of recent revelations of our unsanctioned domestic intelligence apparatus?

MK: What we are witnessing this week stands as a confirmation of what we have ben seeing–unchecked Presidential power in the name of war time. In the Korea and Vietnam wars, one President after another made unchecked decisions and no one blew the whistle, most significantly Congress. Congress was successfully pressured to cede its power to the Executive Branch. For instance, only two Senators voted “no” for the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. When one of those senators, Senator Morse, saw President Johnson, the President put his arm around the Senator and said “Wayne, you are a good American. We do not want to hurt the troops.” Johnson wielded his power through persuasion and it worked–Congressional resistance was vanishingly small.

DC: What do you think of this week’s revelations about PRISM and the Verizon order?

MK: In important ways, I thought that we beat Big Brother when we prevailed in the Cold War. With the indiscriminate collection and analysis of all Verizon users’ telephony metadata (including who we called, where we were, and the inevitable revelation of sensitive information given the answer to the “who” question), we have become what we most fear–executive branch conducting surveillance over ordinary citizens in increasingly intrusive ways. Read More